Setting up Home Assistant as "secondary" Zigbee controller (secondary to SmartThings)

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#1

I’m currently running HassIo on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and things are working well.

Like many, I’m running most of my home automation on SmartThings, and have all of my Z-Wave and Zigbee devices connected that way. My SmartThings setup works well most of the time, and the integration with Google Assistant is great, but I’d like to eliminate my dependence on the cloud and the Internet, BUT, I’m not quite ready to move away from SmartThings completely.

What I’ve been working on doing is setting up Home Assistant to run in parallel to SmartThings. I’ve actually made a lot of progress, but right now I’m getting stuck on directly controlling my Zigbee devices. Here’s what I have set up so far:

  • I have all of my WiFi devices integrated with HomeAssistant.
  • I have Smarter SmartThings with MQTT running well, using Mosquitto running on HassIo as my MQTT broker, and can control all of my SmartThings devices from HomeAssistant, BUT, this doesn’t work offline, since SmartThings still needs to be connected for the MQTT bridge to work.
  • I have a HUSBZB-1 Z-Wave/Zigbee USB adapter installed.
  • With the help of OZWCP, I’ve managed to set up the Z-Wave portion of the adapter as a secondary Z-Wave controller using the ReceiveConfiguration command. I am now able to directly control all of my Z-Wave devices using HomeAssistant, without any dependency on SmartThings being connected to the Internet.

Where I’m getting stuck is on controlling my Zigbee devices. I’ve been looking at Zigbee2mqtt as a possible solution, and am thinking that a CC2530/CC2531 dongle flashed with a Router firmware might be the first step (not coordinator, since the Zigbee coordinator will still be the SmartThings hub), but I’m not sure if this will actually work.

Can anyone help? Is there any way to directly control my Zigbee devices from HomeAssistant, without any cloud dependency, and without disrupting my existing Zigbee network?

Is there any way to perhaps set up HomeAssistant as a Zigbee controller that could control my other Zigbee devices, or as a sniffer to intercept traffic from motion sensors, and receive updates from other Zigbee devices?

#2

By chance have you made any progress on the Zigbee front?

I’m pretty much in exactly the same situation you were. I started with SmartThings years ago when that seemed like the simplest/best solution for home automation available with a promise of more and more local processing. Years later I’ve built pretty extensive Z-wave and Zigbee networks (almost all of which have local device handlers), but there’s been little to no advancement toward getting the automations running local (yes, there’s some…) or getting very complex rules without webCoRE. The new SmartThings app has taken a step toward the complex automations, but it’s still extremely limited and I’m pretty sure they execute through the cloud…

The only difference in my situation is that I’ve purchased a Raspberry Pi 4 for my Home Assistant machine because the latest release indicated support for it. Haven’t gotten my installation to the point of integrating with SmartThings yet, so I’m hoping you have gotten running in parallel hammered out. :smiley:

#3

Sorry, I never made any progress on this. I paused my efforts for some time but just restarted them with Home Assistant on Docker on a NUC (Pi 3 was too slow). Now that things are pretty stable there, I think I’m just going to slowly move things over to the new Z-Wave and Zigbee networks, and maybe create some virtual devices in SmartThings that are linked to HomeAssistant via MQTT.

#4

I’m in the same boat as both of you, coming from SmartThings to home assistant running on a Windows 10 virtualbox VM. I have the same combo USB adapter as the OP. I have Z-Wave running pretty well albeit with just a few test devices. My main concern is getting the Z-Wave devices off of the SmartThings Hub so they run locally. The zigbee, however isn’t going so smooth. I just have a couple devices, ecolink door open close sensor and a smartthings water leak sensor. The ecolink door sensor keeps disconnecting and goes unavailable. Even if I have it within three feet of the controller. I have another one that I have paired with SmartThings and that one is stable and works really well with home assistant, very fast. I’m thinking, since zigbee runs locally on the SmartThings Hub, leaving just the zigbee devices connected to the SmartThings Hub and bring over all the Z-Wave and other Wi-Fi devices to home assistant. I would then swap out the nortek controller for the aeotec Z-Wave Gen 5 plus controller.

Thoughts?